“We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today. Please don’t postpone the earth. If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.”

– Donald Trump, signatory letter/advertisement in the New York Times, December 6, 2009.

“A Trump Administration will focus on real environmental challenges, not phony ones …. We’ll solve real environmental problems in our communities like the need for clean and safe drinking water.”

– Donald Trump, “An America First Energy Plan.” May 26, 2016.

Consider it corrected.

It does not take a climate scientist to understand the intellectual weaknesses of climate alarm. And it does not take a political scientist or political economist to see the problems of any one-world solution, much less a domestic one, to this alleged international problem.…

“Your paper inspired me to re-review some of the congressional testimony of the renewable interests to see whether the litmus test of success was a cost target or more generally, competitiveness and market penetration. I think it is clearly the latter.”

“Imagine the coach of a football team justifying a perennial losing record by telling the administration that his players are getting bigger and faster …. Surely the administration would respond—’yes, we know the general trend and our participation in it. But we want real victories, not moral victories’.”

– Letter from Robert Bradley to Dallas Burtraw, January 1999.

It was arguably the very top intellectual research paper to justify past and continuing U.S. government support for renewable energies at the time of its publication (1999). I had a chance to rebut, working at Enron (as director, public policy analysis) that was a financial supporter of Resources for the Future (RFF), as well as a business leader in renewables.…

“If implemented, this agreement will do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative outside of restructuring of the energy and natural gas industries in Europe and the United States. The potential to add incremental gas sales, and additional demand for renewable technology is enormous. In addition, a carbon emissions trading system will be developed.”

– John Palmisano, from Kyoto, Japan (1997)

A Hall of Shame crony memo just turned 18 years old. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written from Kyoto, Japan, in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano.

Global green planners such as Palmisano were euphoric that, somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). His memo reflects the train-just-left-the-station mentality, as well as the specific benefits for first-mover ‘green’ Enron.…

“The stories in Eichenwald’s book [on Enron] about [Andy] Fastow’s rage reminded me of [Michael] Mann’s rage – often exemplified in public, but now placed further into context by the Climategate letters.”

“The comparison with Enron may also be helpful in placing Climategate into context.”

– Steve McIntyre, February 2010

Back in 2010, Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit wrote a post, Rob Bradley: Climategate from an Enron Perspective. Bradley and McIntyre focus on the intellectual specter of bad science driving out good. As revealed by Climategate, mainstream climate scientists, driven by an agenda of alarmism in the service of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), chose to defend each other (with some exceptions) rather than let the hammer of the scientific method fall where it might.

Jerry North at Texas A&M, featured below, particularly culpable in the wake of Climategate, has largely withdrawn from the debate after a period of activism with his colleague Andy Dessler (who is no doubt having second thought about his I-am-certain high-sensitivity warming position of years past).…